Holy Breathing.

What if the Holy Spirit is a hypostasis of the Godhead… 

and a practice?  

What if she is not just a doctrine, someone we are required to believe in, a Trinitarian “person” — and not just a living, dynamic, presence, permeating the creation, but a physical, embodied action?  What if she is holy breathing, literally a way of inhaling and exhaling, a kind of third element of communion along with the bread and wine of the Eucharist, which is to say, a Way to realize and become one with God?  Bodies require food, and breath.  Maybe prayer in the Name and Spirit of God does that.   

In both of the languages of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, the word that gets translated as “spirit” has more basic meanings as “wind” and “breath.”  Our word “spirit” has acquired technical religious and even supernatural connotations, in addition to other more ambiguous meanings, which can distract us from the more original physical senses of both ruach and pneuma.  Spirit originally simply refers to a movement of air.

What if conscious breathing is (literally) the font of spirituality from which everything else flows?  What if we moved away from thinking that we are the ones doing the breathing to a realization that there is a sense in which God in creation breathes in us?  Breathing is our integration into creation and Creator, it weaves us together with all of life, sharing in respiration the same air.

The integration of breathing into a Jesus Prayer practice is one way to see how our breathing can be an intentional spiritual discipline, not just a reflexive physical activity to obtain oxygen and release carbon dioxide.  The method is to say interiorly the first part of the prayer while inhaling: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and the second part while exhaling: "Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  

Thus we take in the Name, the identity, indeed the mission of Jesus Christ, and we give out whatever in us is separating us from him.  We breathe in our Essence, we breath out our ego.  We receive the flow of pure, clear, energized, oxygenated air, and we relinquish defiled, soiled, poisonous air (which is nevertheless beneficial to other life forms, like plants).  And over time, under this slow air-blasting, our calcified and stubborn egotism flakes off and blows away, revealing the Image of God that is always within us.

The body is not just aerated for its own sake.  Connecting breathing to the Name shows that we are used by that Spirit energy to do the work of mission in the world: living in the Kingdom, spreading God’s love, compassion, justice, and peace.  Divine respiration feeds the mission of the Church: we are Christ-in-the-world.  That mission is also at the same time what demands ever more continual respiration to support it.  Breathing that has no outlet is just debilitating spiritual hyperventilation.  Attempting to do mission without Holy Spirit is like trying to run a marathon without, well, breathing.

Holy Spirit then, is not just something to think about and affirm.  Just observing the work of the Spirit is insufficient.  Maybe Holy Spirit is also something we do, a practice, something — someone — in which we participate.  Maybe prayer in Jesus’ Name provides the spiritual oxygen that enables a body fed in the eucharist to come truly and fully to life!

 

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